Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon: What Startup Founders Get Wrong About the CEO Job

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon on why he killed the Apple Card partnership, the limits of Silicon Valley hiring wisdom, and how serendipity made him CEO.

• Goldman’s market cap grew from ~$60-70B to ~$250B and revenues from ~$34B to ~$55-60B under Solomon’s ~8-year tenure.
• The Apple Card exit was driven by a changed post-2022 regulatory environment, not product failure; the Apple card itself Solomon calls a genuinely good product.
• Consumer banking (Marcus) was under 5% of Goldman revenues but consuming attention as if it were 40% — distraction, not scale, drove the exit decision.
• The real strategic win from the consumer bet was the digital deposit platform, which Solomon says delivers enormous funding benefits to the firm today.
• Goldman’s board initially rejected winding down consumer; Solomon took months across multiple board meetings to get approval.
• Solomon credits Lloyd Blankfein’s 2015 cancer treatment decision — staying rather than stepping down — as the serendipitous event that made Solomon CEO instead of Gary Cohn.
• Post-COVID culture reset: 450 partners sent offsite in groups of 25 for two days each; Solomon personally attended 20 dinners over 15 months to re-underwrite standards of excellence.
• On hiring: Solomon backs ‘smart enough’ over ‘smartest in the room’ — experience and judgment are hugely underrated in Silicon Valley, and are what matter when bumps arrive.

2025-12-18 · Watch on YouTube